notes from The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:
(it’s weird how i always stumble upon old notes at the most relevant times)

Like a meteorite broken off from a planet, I left the circle and have not yet stopped falling.  Some people are granted their death as they are whirling around, and others are smashed at the end of their fall.  And these others (I am one of them) always retain a kind of faint yearning for that lost ring dance, because we are all inhabitants of a universe where everything turns in circles.

a faint, clear metallic tone – like a golden ring falling into a silver basin (see A Collection of Silences entry of this blog)

He needed that silence to make beauty audible (because the death he was speaking of was death-beauty) and for beauty to be perceptible, it needs a minimal degree of silence (of which the precise measure is the sound made by a golden ring falling into a silver basin).

That night Tamina dreamed about the ostriches.  They were standing against the fence, all talking to her at once.  She was terrified.  Unable to move, she watched their mute bills as if she were hypnotized.  She kept her lips convulsively shut.  Because she had a golden ring in her mouth, and she feared for that ring.

The first time Tamina heard that silence (as precious as the fragment of a marble statue from sunken Atlantis) was when she woke up in a mountain hotel surrounded by forests on the morning after she had fled her country.  She heard it a second time when she was swimming in the sea with a stomach full of tablets that brought her not death but unexpected peace.  She wanted to shelter that silence with her body and within her body.  That is why I see her in her dream standing against the wire fence; in her convulsively shut mouth she has a golden ring.  Facing her are six long necks topped by tiny heads with straight bills opening and closing soundlessly.  She does not understand them.  She does not know whether the ostriches are threatening her, warning her, exhorting her, or imploring her.  And because she does not know, she feels immense anguish.  She fears for the golden ring (that tuning fork of silence) and keeps it convulsively in her mouth.

(of poets) we consume ourselves in the idea we believe, we burn in the landscape we are moved by

Tamina will never know what those great birds came to tell her.  But I know.  They did not come to warn her, scold her, or threaten her.  They are not interested in her.  Each one of them came to tell her about itself.  Each one to tell her how it had eaten, how it had slept, how it had run up to the fence and seen her behind it.  That it had spent its important childhood in the important village of Rourou.  That its important orgasm had lasted six hours.  That it had seen a woman strolling behind the fence and she was wearing a shawl.  That it had gone swimming, that it had fallen ill and then recovered.  That when it was young it rode a bike and that today it had gobbled up a sack of grass.  They are standing in front of Tamina and talking to her all at once, vehemently, insistently, aggresively, because there is nothing more important than what they want to tell her.